OKIGBO 60th Birthday: A new insight into the works of an ageless poet

Written By Dele Bankole. Article first published in THE NIGERIAN TRIBUNE August 18th 1992

As we celebrate the post homous 60th birthday of Christopher Okigbo (born August 16th, 1932), there are certain impulses that make a reinterpretation of his only poetry collection LABYRINTHS a must. Some of them are the incessant reference to his iconoclastic status in African poetry and his knocking influence of his poetic signature on the present corpus of Nigerian poets. If we consider the second reason above which is in actual fact an acknowledgement and a reference to a passage that foretold today's political and economic trragedies which kicked off at the instance of a senseless civil, a new reading then becomes necessary.

Okigbo's influence on modern Nigerian poetry has become a poetic character whose virility is more of a touch of Muse. It appears more interesting to note that the works of the likes of Niyi Osundare, Afam Akeh, Harry Garuba, Esiaba Irobi, Chimalum Nwankwo, Odia Ofeimum, Sesan Ajayi, Olu Oguibe and several others partially and grossly belong to the Okigbo school. The overflowing stream of symbolic gestures in Harry Garuba's SHADOW AND DREAMS; the laments and repudiation of a world in shreds of Niyi Osundare's SONG OF THE MARKET PLACE; the individual celebration of weird images as a tool of psychic identification of self in Sesan Ajayi's A BURST OF FIREFLIES; and perhaps the expansive allussions to a mythical cosmology as a picture of an insane socio political order in Olu Oguibe's A GATHERING FEAR carry certain refractions of the Okigboian temparament.

It will appear that the need to re evaluate Okigbo is irrelevant since what will be our new definitions of his canticle are already in the works of what we have referred to Okigbo school. Since there is a one-to-one correspondence between the present concern and crux of the influence, the attempt here will reveal an index and a baseline for the reading and appraisal of the emerging tradition.

What first appeared as an individual enmythification of ideas at different public appearances in TRANSITION and BLACK ORPHEUS in the early sixties turned to be final versions of psychic fulfilment and a spiritual justification of self as an itinerant in quintessential journey of discoveryin LABYRINTHS.

In a sprititual stupour before mother Idoto, the mythical personage embarks on a reconciliatory journey between the imbalances of a threatened world and the innocence of a surrealist thrust. Through this, we see a figment of a pre human feint who engages in evocative sorcery with allusive characters in a dissonant trance. The subsequent matyrdom suggests, though in a veiled manner today's societal malaise. The period spanning the end of the lethal civil war and the present time, LABYRINTHS expressis verbis assumes a clinical testament of the unsavoury temper of an age that has not only lost its meaning but also sense of direction. As a subtle declaration, LABYRINTHS as we have it today is an existential verification of sordid realities.

"Heavensgate" cannot remain a ceremony of an innocence but a demand for a spiritual emulgence of misdeeds. The naked prodigal before the river goddess Idoto has had his physical make-up splashed with the life giving water, still he is a white sepulchre whose bowel is a horrendous sight to behold. The fitful personage is to embark on a journey that will enable him see odds of existence. He will not come out as a martyr but a panting soul in need of spiritual rehabilitation.

The cultic fantasy in "siren limits" and "Fragment" are not in this age a display of the Manichean simplism of life and death or as the imaginative clapperboard of a soul at a crossroads but an existential exemplification of human tragedy of hunger, poverty and civil strife. Note the use of extensive of irony in "Fragments IV" ("and you talk of the people/there is none thirsty among them"). The gods are even tired as chorused in the sublimnity of "Fragments XI" ("and the gods lie in state") ...Echoes of Nietzsche " God is dead". The sombre tone as a reflection of these odds is expressed in a punchline fashion in "Laments of the drums" ("the wailing is for the fields of men") the great river is drying and the fields of crop are withering. The dignification of ancestors is out of the place for they (the ancestors) could not foreclose the present misery.

The prophetic vision of Okigbo is delicately constructed in "Path of Thunder" (a series he never saw its completion before his death in 1967 during the civil war) which shows poetry could be a visionary rendition of caustic feelings. Those feelings actually saw the Nigerian civil war. The unfolding trauma we consistently experience today as a nation is presaged in this terse book of revelation. In "Elergy for Alto", he refers to politicians and robbers as ravening eagles, ("the eagles have come/the eagles rain down on us"). Politicians of today and armed robbers are a twin of some sorts, a singular entity that partakes in a comedy of errors.. This age indeed hears nothing more than "condolences" ("Elergy for for sit drum") for the nation that treads on a long stretch of paroxysm. The prophetic construct here could be a knocking lampoon composed long before now for the age whose definition is meaninglessnes and chaos.

This ageless collection is a feeder to the poetic pre occupation of the modern Nigerian poetry. Apart from their indulgence in Okigbo's symbolic and allusive modes, the minstrelsy of creative texture, and a style and structure in the sublime,the new school is nonetheless a tentacle of context, form and style as presaged and scrolled by Christopher Okigbo. Indeed this development has placed Okigbo as a member of the sacred "living dead"who have continued to register their veiled existence on modern poetic creations. In fact, what Christopher Okigbo's LABYRINTHS has done for us is akin to what T.S Eliot's WASTELAND did to post World War western modernist poetry.